Research Paper Number

Title

Authors

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Keywords

Constitutionalization; Labour rights; political economy

Abstract

In recent years there has been an outpouring of popular and scholarly writing on the constitutionalization of labour rights. In this paper I seek to add to this literature in three ways. First, at a conceptual level I unpack two important dimensions of labour rights, their thickness and their hardness. Second, in order to comprehend the multiplicity of sites at which efforts to entrench labour rights are being made, I map them out on a geographic scale. I observe that as the geographic scale of labour rights expands, they become thinner and softer. Third, I emphasize the need to analyze the constitutionalization of labour rights against the backdrop of other constitutionalization project, particularly the effort to constitutionalize the rights of capital.